Islamabad fire: At least 15 newborn babies dead in blaze at Islamabad hospital’s maternity ward

At least 15 babies have died after a fire broke out in the maternity ward of a major hospital in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

The fire began after an air conditioning unit exploded on Wednesday morning in the gynaecology ward of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims), one of the country’s leading hospitals.

The nursery housed 16 newborns at the time of the incident, of whom only one was rescued, said hospital officials. The fire has now been extinguished and teams are carrying out cooling operations at the site, rescue officials told local broadcaster GeoTV.

Emergency response teams rushed to the hospital earlier to bring the fire under control, evacuate patients and secure the affected area.

The death toll was reported by GeoTV and other local media citing sources within the rescue team. There has been no formal statement from the hospital or other authorities on the number of casualties.

Pims hospital in Islamabad recently received global media attention after former prime minister Imran Khan was brought there from jail for a court-mandated medical assessment.

Pakistan has a poor fire safety record, compounded by a lack of regulatory enforcement. Wednesday’s incident comes three months after at least 43 people were injured by a massive fire at a Pakistan Customs warehouse in southwestern Balochistan province.

In January, a huge fire swept through shops and warehouses at the Gul Plaza in Karachi in which at least 72 people were killed. The fire broke out at a shopping plaza which houses 1,200 shops in a multi-storey complex on MA Jinnah Road in Karachi’s commercial Saddar area on 17 January, gutted the building and took nearly a week for the firefighters to bring it under control.

In November last year, at least 18 workers were killed, and 21 were injured after an explosion at a glue-making factory in Faisalabad city in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Police said they had arrested the factory’s manager and were searching for the owner, who fled shortly after the explosion.